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409 Franciscan Studies 63 (2005) FRANCISCANS BETWEEN OBSERVANCE AND REFORMATION: THE LOW COUNTRIES (ca. 1400-1600) Introduction On Saturday November 6, 2004, the fourteenth Dutch Signum symposium on late medieval religious culture in the Low Countries was held, this time in Groningen. Its overarching theme was the rich legacy of the mendicant orders and their impact on late medieval society. In the announcement for the 2004 Symposium, the organizers – a group of enthusiastic and very active young Dutch mediaevalists – had complained about the lack of serious scholarly research on the functioning of the mendicant orders in the Low Countries during the late medieval period. From that perspective, they asked me to present the audience with an initial sketch of the Franciscan impact on the religious climate in that region. This article is an extended English version of that lecture. At first sight, a bibliographical foray into the scholarly output regarding the Franciscan presence in the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries might seem to refute the organizers’ claim that we are suffering from a lack of serious scholarly research. Late medieval Franciscan authors and preachers appear in a number of nineteenth and twentieth century publications by Dutch and Belgian friars interested in the literary history of their order provinces. Cases in point are the studies by Servatius Dirks, Wolfgang Schmitz and, more recently , Benjamin De Troeyer. At closer look, however, it appears that the organizers of the Signum symposium do have a point, for these authors predominantly limited themselves to – at times rather opiniated – overviews concerning the life and work of medieval friars, with- BERT ROEST 410 out providing a convincing socio-cultural context in which these friars composed their texts and engaged in their pastoral ministry.1 The same medieval friars figure prominently in the by now dated survey histories by Patricius Schlager and Konrad Eubel on the Franciscan order in the Cologne province.2 The books by Schlager and Eubel still subscribe to a very traditional form of Catholic Franciscan scholarship. As a result, these works have a strong two-dimensional character. In general, they focus to a very large degree on the conflicts between Conventual and Observant factions in the later fifteenth century . They also present an overly eulogical view of the pastoral activities and the doctrinal perseverance of the medieval friars, and are blatantly prejudiced with regard to pre-reformatory and reformatory developments . The latter are openly depicted as lamentable and willful departures from self-evident Catholic truth. There have been a few attempts to come to a more encompassing and balanced treatment of the life and work of various late medieval Franciscans active in the Low Countries. Yet this has remained limited to some of the most well-known brothers, and again in ways that nowadays look old-fashioned and deficient from a methodological point of view. The best examples in this tradition are the nineteenthcentury works by Willem Moll on the Observant friar Jan Brugman3 and, more recently, the multi-volume studies by Maria Meertens and Stephanus Axters on the history of religious devotion in the Low 1 S. Dirks, Histoire littéraire et bibliographique des Frères Mineures de l’Observance de St. François en Belgique et dans les Pays-Bas (Antwerp: Van Os-De Wolf, 1885). (A reprint of this work appeared in 1998 at St. Truiden as no. 46 in the Instrumenta Franciscana series); W. Schmitz, Het aandeel der minderbroeders in onze middeleeuwse literatuur. Inleiding tot een bibliografie der Nederlandse franciscanen (Nijmegen-Utrecht: Dekker en Van de Vegt, 1936); Benjamin De Troeyer, Bio-Bibliographia Franciscana Saeculi XVI, 2 Vols. (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1969-1970); Benjamin De Troeyer, Bio-Bibliografia Franciscana Neerlandica ante Saec. XVI, I (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1974). See also Leonide Mees, Bio-Bibliografia Franciscana Neerlandica ante Saec. XVI, II & III: Incunabula (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1974). 2 Konrad Eubel, Geschichte der Kölnischen Minoriten-Ordensprovinz (Cologne: J. & W. Boisseree, 1906); Patricius Schlager, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kölnischen FranziskanerOrdensprovinz im Mittelalter (Cologne: J.P. Bachem, 1904); Patricius Schlager, Geschichte der kölnischen Franziskaner-Ordensprovinz während des Reformationszeitalters (Regensburg: Coppenrath, 1909). Until c. 1530, most Franciscan friaries in the Low Countries belonged to the Cologne Province. Therafter nearly...

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